COMPANY CONSULTS THE CROWDS

Tragedy spurs Tomnod to improve satellite searches

Satellite imagery, long the stuff of action movies and spy novels, is becoming more mainstream. Much of the planet is photographed regularly by overhead cameras. Barrington said a firm in the Bay Area has commercial plans to offer images taken every three hours of any point on the Earth.

“You can call that spooky and Big Brotherish, or you can say it may help us find everyone who gets abducted and every climber who goes missing,” Barrington said.

Right now, the vast majority of what’s photographed never gets looked at, and firms like Tomnod are trying to figure out how to tap into that imagery and make it useful and profitable. (U-T San Diego has been one of the company’s clients.)

Looking at the images takes time, which is where the crowdsourcing comes in. During the search for Khan’s tomb, more than 10,000 volunteers pored over photos and tagged areas that seemed promising. By seeing which areas generated the most tags, Tomnod was able to narrow its focus.

The “wisdom of the crowds” is how it’s worked on other projects, too, like monitoring the ongoing unrest in Syria, Barrington said. But the firm had never used the technology for a search and rescue mission. Until Peru.

Making it work

The idea now is to create some kind of system so that the next time someone disappears, satellite imagery and crowdsourcing can go to work immediately.

Easier said than done. Getting the images takes time. In the Peru search, it just so happened that there was a big technology conference in San Diego that week, and asking for help meant walking across the room and talking to someone at the satellite companies. But even then it took about two days for a satellite to take pictures and get the raw images to Tomnod.

The images can be expensive — thousands of dollars. Someone would have to fund or donate that. They can be hard to decipher — three of the searchers in Peru appear as gray blobs on the satellite photos.

And then word has to spread about the need for crowdsourcing help. With Peru, there were postings on Facebook and various Internet climbing forums. An hour after the photos were available online, 36 registered taggers were examining them. That eventually grew to almost 300, many of them friends and family of the missing climbers.

Barrington said there have been talks with local officials about deploying the technology in a natural disaster, like a fire or a flood, but nothing yet about search and rescue.

Others are already using a similar approach.
InternetSAR.org was created after Steve Fossett, the businessman and adventurer, disappeared in his plane in 2007. Satellite images were scoured in an attempt to find him.

But the images were of Nevada, where he took off, and not of the Eastern Sierra, where he crashed. The wreckage was discovered a year later after a hiker came across the pilot’s identification cards.

Ken Barbalace, a web developer in Saco, Maine, who runs InternetSAR, said the volunteer group has tried to find two other missing planes, one in British Columbia and the other in Guyana, without success yet.

“I think it has potential, but what we’ve learned is there are a lot of challenges to using satellites for active search operations,” he said.

It’s the potential that Tomnod is hanging on to, a silver lining in the dark cloud of the Peru tragedy. “How can we do it again so the next time, when someone is waiting to be rescued, we can get there quickly?” Barrington said. “We would love to be able to make that work.”